Pro Football in Los Angeles - A History

Yesterday, I wrote about Cal, Stanford, USC, the Rose Bowl game, and the explosion of college football in the boom decade of the 20s. Unlike the movie palaces we've been talking about, Cal's Memorial Stadium, Stanford Stadium, USC's Memorial Stadium, and the Rose Bowl, have been hosting their respective teams continuously from the early 20s on. They've all had some facelifts, some more than others. Those stadiums stand as a reminder of a time when there was doubt about the future of American football, and the eventual commitment to making that game America's collegiate game. To think, we could have been a nation playing English rugby, or soccer!

The schools way back east refused to get on a bowl game bandwagon, and got left behind when football boomed again in the Jet Age. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Army, no longer football powers. It was the rust belt schools: Michigan, Ohio State, Notre Dame, that partnered with the Pac schools in growing the game. It was out of the rust belt (Canton, Ohio) that the NFL was born.

The idea was simple enough. College athletics were starting to adopt rules regarding scheduling. With conferences forming and setting these rules, that meant schools couldn't play high schools, army infantries, and athletic clubs anymore. So these teams representing athletic clubs, meat packing plants, and food starch companies, got together and formed their own professional leagues, signing these former stars to contracts.

Wanting to get in on the action, plans were made for a Pacific Football League to launch in 1934. While the NFL teams back east mostly played in the already established major league baseball stadiums, oil magnate Arthur F. Gilmore built a football specific stadium in 1934 on Fairfax and Third. It seated just a fraction of what the college stadiums did, just 20,000.

You really do need the aerial view to get a sense of the scope of these stadiums. The track was used to host Midget Car racing, a sport first organized at Loyola High School Stadium in Los Angeles. You can see why an oil man would want to associate himself with a burgeoning auto sport. Football at Gilmore Stadium was just taking advantage of an open field. 

In fact, when the PFL was in the planning stages, they didn't know if they'd use Gilmore Stadium or Wrigley Field in South Central. The idea was to have four clubs in the South, with one home stadium, representing former players from USC, Loyola, UCLA, and Santa Clara. Then there'd be two teams from the North, with players from Cal, Stanford, San Francisco Univeristy, and St. Mary's.

Also part of the planning was that the winner of the league would play the winner of the National league back east, a precursor to the Super Bowl. Ultimately, those plans fell through. The two northern teams withdrew, and then the whole thing folded a year later in 1935. At that point the league was sponsored by the American Legion, and had teams like the the Westwood Cubs and Hollywood Braves. 

Gilmore Stadium was known primarily as a Midget racing venue. Loyola High School would play big football games there, my grandmother remembers going to Gilmore Stadium for games. It was a boom time for minor league football though. The Dixie league formed in the south, and there were others, all trying to take advantage of these college stars with nowhere to play. 

The NFL would occasionally play exhibition games at Gilmore Stadium, as happened in 1936. Just after a Rose Bowl game between Stanford and SMU, the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers played at Gilmore Field. The Lions were national champs at the time, and the game drew the biggest crowd on record at the time at Gilmore. 

Interestingly, the reason they had to play the game at Gilmore was because pro football was banned at the Coliseum. The Lions vowed not to return to Los Angeles until they could play at the larger venue. Anyhow, the American Legion founds the Los Angeles Bulldogs, playing as an independent in 1936 and inviting NFL teams out for a weekend in LA. Team owner Harry Meyer (nicknamed moneybags) also took his team barnstorming back east, hoping to earn a bid in the NFL. The NFL decided to accept an AFL II team from Cleveland, the Cleveland Rams, instead. The plot thickens. 

The Bulldogs played in AFL II for a year, going undefeated and effectively bankrupting the entire league. By now we're at 1940, and the Bulldogs help form the Pacific Coast Professional Football League so they'd have some opponents. Their main competition was the Hollywood Bears, named for their coaches alma mater (UCLA), and the league was basically formed so the two teams could compete for something other than the LA Championship. 

Los Angeles was also becoming known as a football hotbed, with the NFL playing two Pro Bowls there in the 1940 calendar year. 

The Bulldogs had gained a reputation as the best team outside the NFL, and the PCPFL quickly gained a reputation as a place for black stars to shine. The NFL didn't allow black players at the time. Neither did Major League Baseball. This is how the Bulldogs were able to get a UCLA multi-sport star to play for them: Jackie Robinson. 

Now in 1943, sports entrepreneur Bill Freelove starts buying out the contracts of LA Bulldogs players to form the appropriately named LA Mustangs. The Mustangs also played at Gilmore Stadium. The Mustangs were granted PCPFL membership for 1943, but with the other owner fearing similar raids, they were kicked out in 1944. He goes and forms AFL III, but it doesn't come to much. 

Who knew that a stadium that couldn't hold more than 20k and was demolished by the fifties held so much history? Well all that attention the Los Angeles Bulldogs and Gilmore Stadium created paid off, but not for them. The NFL, and new competitor AAFC, had their sights set on Los Angeles. Of course, the team to move out for the NFL was those Cleveland Rams the NFL chose over the LA Bulldogs, and they found a way to play their games at the Coliseum which had banned pro football. 

As far as I can tell, it was simply a matter of the Coliseum softening it's position and the NFL having buckets of cash to throw at them. Owner Dan Reeves simply submitted an application to use the Coliseum to the commission that met once a year. The AAFC club, the Los Angeles Dons, also had designs on using the Coliseum. 

"It's going to be the best professional football town in the country," Reeves declared. He was right, and the Rams won out the battle for the Coliseum, with the AAFC folding the Dons when they merged with the NFL. 

The Rams would form a great rivalry with the former AAFC's San Francisco 49ers, and selling out the Coliseum was common. Selling out the Coliseum was a problem though, as traffic was terrible. The 49ers didn't have it much better, playing at Kezar Stadium. 

Cool spot, but like the Coliseum it's a large neighborhood stadium that became obsolete as the NFL and MLB switched to large multipurpose suburban stadiums. The 49ers would move into a converted Candlestick Park in 1970, and the Rams to a converted Anaheim Stadium in 1980. 

Neighborhood stadiums like that are common in the English Premier League (soccer), and of course the coolest college stadiums are on college campuses. The NFL and MLB saw the potential to become regional entities and built accordingly. Can't exactly argue against the results, although it didn't work out so well for baseball which has tried to tap back into that past in smaller neighborhood stadiums. 

The Rams ultimately left the region and the 49ers are desperate to find a new place to play. Gilmore Stadium was demolished in 1952 to build CBS Television city. The stadium that only wanted college football survived the LA Rams, Dons, Chargers, and Raiders and is now returned to just hosting USC.